Those trials only expire when you start playing with the system clock. The only way to get it working again is to format your harddrive.
Bob
bah….kind of hard to format when I dont have XP cd’s around.
<stupid question> where’s the xp disks?</sq>
<stupid answer>they didnt come with my comp and i cant find a decent price for them, ive only seen $200+</sa>
<stupid reply>do you know that’s illegal?</sr>
<what is he talking about>whats illegal?</wihta>
He kaitiora tana whakakàkahu mo te whakakitenga a te kura!
<Tip-o’-the-pòtae to Dion and T.F.
Daniel,
whats illegal?<<
If you have a license for WinXP, then you will have someway of re-installing it. If you do not have a license for WinXP then you are running the O/S illegally.
rofl…..its a legal copy…the CD’s just never comp with the comp since the guy at the store said they dont pack cd’s with comps with 40gb+ hard drives.
The "guy at the store" is lying out his @ss. They may not give you a MS Windows CD, but they STILL give you an OS "image" CD that overlays the OS onto the system. Dell, Gateway, E-Machines all provide them with the PCs, I know, I’ve got a drawer of them in addition to my MS XP pro that I purchased separately to upgrade my "screamer" with the Radion 9600 video card…
If your copy is legal, they HAVE to give you a way to reinsall the OS…someone’s trying to pull the wool over someone’s eyes…
It does bring up the question if the switch to Daylight Savings Time (which adjusts your PC’s internal clock automatically) may have caused the trial version to expire prematurely…
I think Chris pointed out that DST would not kill the trial.
Additionally, I’ll point out that Dell supplies a full WinXP install CD, not a restore CD.
Bob
I think all the major puter makers dropped the "restore" CD thing with XP. Something about the way it installs, or license issues, or both, or something.
Mac
My mother in law and son both have cheap HP computers (Celeron) with 40 gig hard drives. They had no CDs. The images are on a separate partition, and you have to reinstall XP from that partition.
I would never buy a computer for myself that didn’t have the software on CD, since if their hard drive fails and they need to replace it, there would be no way to reinstall Windows.
You can, however, reformat and reinstall Windoze from that partition, but you need to have your Windoze serial number handy in order to do it.
On their PCs, the serial number is somewhere on the machine with clear tape over it, rather than on a separate certificate.
Daniel, try searching for another partition on your hard drive using Windoze Explorer. You may have to make the hidden files and folders visible to see it.
I’m not sure how you would reformat on those computers, but I would expect there is a way in one of the menus, maybe in control panel.